Power and Powerlessness

The whole world is learning that it must resist and react.

The Trump regime’s first month was designed to disempower all of us. The shock and awe of permanent provocation was intended to make citizens and leaders alike forget that we too make history, we too have agency. But we mustn’t forget. The fate of the world is not going to be determined in Washington or Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump regime is proclaiming that the United States is tired of empire, tired of being tied down by alliance burdens and freeloading allies. If so, the rest of the world is being handed the kind of opportunity that only happens in epochal moments of imperial retreat. Instead of panicking, leaders on all continents have the chance to step up and reclaim responsibilities once left to Washington. Nobody knows whether they can, until they try.

There is a price to pay when imperial powers turn allies into enemies. The United States loses leverage when it cosies up to aggressors and abandons its friends. The Ukrainians may have been betrayed, but they will keep fighting, even if the Americans abandon them. The Europeans, with the future of Nato dependent on them, will have to resupply the Ukrainian armed forces and rebuild the 80 per cent of Ukraine that remains free and independent using billions dollars worth of seized Russian assets. These are the “security guarantees” that matter, and if the Americans walk away, Europe will have to provide them.

This isn’t a charitable gesture but a condition of Europe’s survival. If Europe fails, Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, will fall back under a Russian sphere of influence, subject to electoral manipulation, subversion and energy blackmail. Soon after that, the entire post 1989 project of European unity will collapse, and Europe will fracture into 27 feuding micro-states. None of these outcomes is certain, but however it turns out, the result does not depend on the Trump regime, but on whether European leaders can rediscover their capacity for independent action.

Canada, my country, is also rediscovering that it has existential choices to make. It had become complacent about its many virtues and has had a sharp awakening. Every time Trump or his acolytes talks about Canada as the 51st state, every Canadian, of whatever party, remembers why they want to remain independent. Canada isn’t used to using its oil, gas, electricity and critical minerals as strategic assets, but if that’s what it takes to stay sovereign and free, the country is prepared to do so.

When JD Vance asked his Munich audience whether Europe really believes in freedom, Europeans realised his idea of freedom is not theirs. Europe knows something about fascism that Americans will never understand, and it sets up the firewalls around its democracy accordingly. Vance’s provocations should offer Europeans a chance to remember why they want to remain free, and what challenges they have to overcome in order to do so. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank from 2011 until 2019, argues that Europe must unify its capital and labour markets and recover its capacity to commercialise innovation to avoid becoming a dependent client of Russian oil and gas, a despondent museum of faded glories. Trump’s threats make the case for Draghi’s agenda.

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Everywhere you look, Trump is forcing former allies to make existential choices they’ve deferred for too long. The Greenlanders will have to decide whether they want to be an US colony. The Panamians will have to decide how best to hold on to their canal. The Mexicans will have to figure out, with their Canadian friends, how to keep the border secure, and maintain the cross-border just in time manufacturing that is the economic mainstay of both economies.

The same awakening is occuring in East Asia. If America walks back on its defence commitments, Japan will have to re-arm and defend itself alone; if Trump slaps tariffs on Japanese imports, Tokyo will react with counter-measures. If America withdraws its troops from South Korea, Seoul may have to develop a nuclear weapon to keep North Korea at bay. If America abandons Ukraine, Taiwan will disbelieve Washington’s security guarantees, and will have to negotiate its reabsorption into the Chinese mainland.

The same moment of choice has arrived in all nations, on all continents. The many African nations that have counted on US aid or investment must decide whether to get still closer to China. Fragile states in West Africa, like Mali and Niger, will have to decide whether depending on Russia’s Wagner mercenaries protects them better against the jihadis than the departing French legions.

In the Middle East, Israel has re-established military dominance, while sacrificing any chance of long-term peace with its Arab neighbors or the Palestinians. If ever an ally’s tail wagged an imperial dog, this is it. Fealty to Israel has cost the US whatever leverage it ever had over the Egyptian and Gulf regimes. They’ve rejected, out of hand, Trump’s idea of an American owned leisure park built on the ruins of Gaza.

Once they discover just how unreliable the Americans have become, Brazil and India, who have been placing two way bets on the imperial rival, China and the United States, will likely line up with the autocrats. But these emerging powers, with young demographics, know that America’s rivals are gerontocracies, sitting on top of demographically declining societies strangled by single party police states. What rising country, full of young people, wants to hitch its future to aging kleptocracies? If America abandons its role as a provider of global public goods, there is no alternative superpower with an equivalent capacity to attract and compel its allies.

In making his overture to Putin, Trump has gambled that he, Putin and Ji can divide the world into zones of influence, each controlled by a super-power. He’s also gambled that he can split the Russia-China alliance. But it is China, not the US, that holds the cards here and a jointly shared Russo-Chinese sphere of influence in Eurasia, running from Pacific East Asia to the Eastern frontiers of Europe may prove impossible for America to pry apart.

In a world split between three rivalrous superpowers, a truly plural world order—dangerous, unstable, uncertain—could emerge. It would be an order of sovereigns constantly manouvering for competitive advantage, seeking alliances and partnerships in which, for the first time in 80 years, no one waits for Washington for permission, but everyone checks in with Moscow and Beijing. The trio may decide on new rules to keep commerce, digital connection and supply chains functioning. Deconfliction regimes might be cobbled together to spare us nuclear exchanges between superpowers, but the new world order will be a constantly evolving multi-dimensional system, at the edge of chaos, with the spectre of climate change hovering over everyone’s hopes for the future.

For all its bluster, the Trump regime does not control this emerging international environment and it doesn’t even control its domestic situation. State and federal courts will likely strike down the most flagrantly unconstitutional of his gambits, the media will keep snapping at the administration’s heels, and the political atmosphere on social media universe may well slip out of the regime’s control. Industrial giants whose supply chains depend on imports are already beginning to howl about the administration’s tariff strategy. The stock market doesn’t like what it sees in the medium term inflation and job numbers, and the US public’s approval rating of the administration is already slipping. It’s not hard to understand why. Nobody living on social security cheques—and that means millions of Americans—likes Elon Musk’s boys siphoning their files onto his data-mining servers.

So democracy is not dead yet in America, simply because it is too large, too raucous, too evenly divided to ever be securely in any regime’s hands. The regime’s electoral support is vulnerable because so many Americans understand that its power rests on a crime—disputing the result of a free and fair election, inciting a mob to attack Congress, and then, once back in power, pardoning the perpetrators.

Democracy’s future in America may well depend on how many American voters remember this chain of events and for how long. In 2024, millions gave Trump’s crime against democracy a pass, in their haste to get rid of the Biden administration. As Trump transforms America into an illiberal democracy, as the guardrails are torn down, Americans may understand at last what danger they face, and then a democratic reckoning with this terrible regime will begin. There will be—there must be—elections in 2026 and 2028, and the people, by then, will insist on having their say

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